The Game...

The Tron arcade game is composed of 4 individual games...

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Grid Bugs

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Probably the easiest game in Tron. The object of this game is to
move Tron into the "flashing circle" which is the I/O Tower in
the center of the screen
before time runs out. The gridbugs (which appear in the movie for
a whopping 3 seconds) multiply like mad, and if Tron touches them,
he dies. But the user can move Tron's arm with the spinner to aim,
and fire disks at the bugs to kill them. If Tron makes it into the
I/O Tower, he is beamed up, and the game is completed.

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Light Cycles

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Probably the most popular game in Tron. This is the game that is
usually what is meant when people refer to a "Tron-like" game. The
object is to surround the computer's yellow cycles with a trail of
light emitted from the back of Tron's blue cycle. If Tron's
cycle runs into the side walls, or light from any of the other
cycles, he dies.

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MCP Cone

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This game is similar to the Atari game "Breakout". The object is to
clear a hole in the protective blocks in front of the MCP cone so that
Tron can make it into the cone itself... Unlike the movie where Flynn
jumped into the cone, and Tron just shot his disk in. Anyway. To
make matters worse, the cone can have up to 6 levels of protective
blocks, which rotate either clockwise, or counter-clockwise, AND the
whole shebang moves down, towards Tron...

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Tanks

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The tanks game in Tron is similar to the Atari 2600/VCS game "Combat",
but not really. You have to move Tron's red tank through a maze and
shoot the computer's blue tanks or red recognizers. There are anywhere
between 1 and 5 enemy tanks to destroy. Enemy tanks require only one
shot to take out Tron's tank, while Tron must fire three shots to take
out one of the computer's tanks.

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The game is organized into 12 levels, easiest to hardest, as follows:

Level

Name

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Level

Name

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Level

Name

01

RPG

05

SNOBOL

09

ASSEMBLY

02

COBOL

06

PL1

10

OS

03

BASIC

07

PASCAL

11

JCL

04

FORTRAN

08

ALGOL

12

USER

Game Strategies

These are scanned pages from Joystik Magazine's January 1983
issue. This is Richard Ross' strategy. He won the Tron contest (July
6-7 1982) with a total of 3,958,901 points
over three games. (That contest was covered in Joystik's November
1982 issue... scans to come soon...)
I'll HTMLize these later...

This is my strategy & patterns that I use when I play. It is a
combonation of Rob's,
Tim Oertel's (Hi Tim!)
and my patterns & many hours spent standing in our living room...
My high score is currently 145,000 points
, and my average is around 88,000 points per game, with everything
set at the factory default settings.

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My Game...

Here's a terrible image of my Tron arcade machine

Here are my Tron machines. The fullsize tron is on the right, and
the mini is to the left... The mini now contains Satan's Hollow.
The mini has a regular arcade stick in it from a (failed) attempt to
put pengo in that machine...
Also in the picture are a few MCR2 boardsets, a small stuffed penguin,
and the head from
my halloween costume, Max, from the Sam & Max comics. There's also
an Atari 400 atop the fullsize Tron.
You can notice that the frontmost edge of the side sticker has been
painted, and is wearing through. (anyone have a replacement?)

Joystick Insert image!!Here is the long awaited .jpg of the joystick insert for my
TRON arcade machine. It was scanned in at 600dpi, then retouched a little. Corel Paint
and Adobe Photoshop were used. Just print it out on a Dye Sublimation printer at 600dpi,
sandwich it between some acetate or very thin plexiglass, and call it good!
You might need to adjust the brightness and contrast of it to get it to print properly..

All graphics on this page were originally generated by the "KEM"
and "MAME" emulators, and slightly mangled
in Adobe Photoshop. All photographs were taken by myself with an Olympus
XA 35mm camera (thanks dad!), and mangled in Photoshop as well.

What do you think? Too much
red,
yellow and
blue?
Too bad!

This page should look decent in Net$crape Alligator, Micro$loth Imploder,
Mosaic & Lynx. If you have any problems with viewing it under any
of these, send me mail with the version number you're using...